I asked a marketing colleague the other day if she uses Twitter, and she responded that she really didn’t have the time and besides, who’s interested in what she had for lunch?

I asked the wrong question, which should have been, “Do your customers use Twitter?" A  quick search showed that they do, and in the last few hours they had provided some interesting insights about her brand.

One conceptual stumbling block about Twitter is the “Why do people care what I’m doing every given second?” question, but that has two answers.  One is to stop thinking about Twitter in terms of you and what you are doing, but as mother lode of what other people are doing and thinking, starting at any point in time and moving back as long as Twitter has been saving their tweets.  If you aren’t sure what Twitter is, don’t start by tweeting your own comments, or even by following the tweets of any one person. Start at http://search.twitter.com and look up something about your industry, company or product. If it is a real timely topic, you’ll actually see the tweets scrolling by. Twitter also has links to trending topics, so you can see what lots of people are talking about right now.   You can do all this without even setting up a Twitter account. Once you understand how the search feature works, you can incorporate it into your standard marketing intelligence playbook, along with things like Google Alerts. One insightful marketer uses Twitter to develop personas that characterize their customers.   If you use an RSS reader, save your searches and check them periodically.

Of course, once you’ve passively used Twitter, you can get an account and start following people who you find during your searches that are contributing content that’s interesting or relevant to you. And, finally, you can start tweeting about things yourself, that roll up into the voice of the crowd. That's the second answer.

Who’s interested in what you had for lunch?  You’d be surprised.

 

Capitol Hill in Second Life continues to draw visitors from around the world interested in the political season. In addition to the twitter display I added a couple weeks ago, I’ve added an electoral map that shows most recent polling on a state-by-state basis.

The technology behind it is interesting. I had originally created a display that would be used on election night, with states called and updated manually. I was looking for a site with live feed of current polling data to feed the display prior to the election, and Leon suggested looking at a scraping web service, Dapper.net, that might be useful. Dapper’s library of scraping scripts included one for RealClearPolitics.com that was easy to hook up to the board (via a PHP intermediary I wrote to turn Dapper’s JSON output into a LSL-consumable feed).  However, the page on realclearpolitics.com that Dapper was scraping only had 37 of the states, which made for a fairly impoverished display.

Although I like the realclearpolitics.com methodology for a weighted average poll-of-polls, I looked for a site with all states, and found USAElectionPolls.com Though this site seems to feed out only the one latest poll it finds for each state, and not a weighted average of polls, it does give a complete set. Dapper was very easy to use to create a scrape of the site to output the data as JSON.

I may channel my inner Brokaw and use the map in manual mode on election night, or I might challenge myself to quickly find a site that can be Dapper-scraped and feed the board automatically.

Why does this matter?
Why do you need a display like this in Second Life when you can go to dozens of web sites with electoral maps?  I believe that the strength of an immersive session in a virtual world is enhanced by the continuity of the immersion. Even though Second Life now supports both an in-application web browser window and web content displayed on the surface of objects in Second Life, having an interactive display that can be manipulated by an avatar means you don’t have to shift back and forth from the perspective of the avatar to the perspective of a web-surfer.

I've installed a new display at Capitol Hill in Second Life that streams Twitter tweets about candidates.  The tweets float above columns, and are refreshed every minute with a search for Obama, Biden, McCain or Palin. You can also talk to the display to get the latest tweets about an individual candidate. Touch a column, and you get the original post on Twitter that you can use to follow links, etc.

The Capitol Hill region has been one of a number of gathering places in Second Life during the debates. Though a lot of avatars tend to gather at party headquarters, Capitol Hill draws those wanting more of a cross-party discussion.

 As for me, joining the discussion in Second Life, with an eye on the Twitter election channel, and another eye on my TV, makes my head explode.

Couric:

What newspapers do you read?

Palin:

Oh, Katie, that’s such a quaint old-timey question – news “papers” - that’s like asking me what “records” I listen to or what “evening news show” I watch.

Well, I do still get the newspaper from my hometown of Wasilla every week – it’s good to stay connected to my roots, to see what is happening at the community level, and to support the small town business.

And I read the Anchorage Daily News – I am still the Governor of Alaska, after all. Most days I read it online, but I get the Sunday edition delivered to my house because my kids (and Todd!) like to read the Sunday funnies the old-fashioned way.

But that’s about as much “paper” as I’m willing to consume just to get the news.

Of course I have news sources beyond the Alaskan border, Katie. If you were to hack into my Google Reader account (please don’t!) you’d see I have it set up with many feeds, not just from traditional “newspaper” sites, but from a variety of sources with a variety of outlooks, including cable news sites and the best of the blogs. That way I can scan the headlines, read the articles, easily see how the same story is reported from different points of view, and form my own opinions.

And, like many Americans, I have my Google Alerts set up to bring me news on specific topics, and I’m constantly updating it with topics that deserve my attention and consideration as a candidate for Vice President. I don’t know how I managed without that one!

So, how about you, Katie. What "newspapers" do you read?